Technological clairvoyance is hard to come by ... The Castle and The Sandbox is much easier

PREDICTING the course of technological advance can be a risky business.

Scorn such advances and you risk being left behind, as when Sony kept investing in flat-screen versions of cathode-ray televisions in the 1990s while Samsung piled into liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). Eventually Samsung replaced Sony as market leader.

Embrace them too early and you may be left with egg on your face, as when General Motors spent more than $1 billion developing hydrogen fuel cells at the beginning of the century only to see them overtaken by lithium-ion batteries as the preferred power source for electric and hybrid vehicles.

To determine when to proceed with a new technology many managers and engineers employ popular heuristics, some of which are seen as “laws”.

The best known is Moore’s Law, proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel. At first it stated that as more transistors are crammed onto t..e surface of silicon chips, the devices double in performance every year. This law was later revised to two years, and chip performance is now usually reckoned to double every 18 months.

Other laws use S curves and various other calculations to predict how technologies will evolve...